by Grace Crawford

All Total Recall images courtesy of Carolco Pictures, StudioCanal, and TriStar Pictures.

At some point in every person’s life, no matter how happy they are, they wish they were someone else. It could be an eight-year-old in math class, dreaming of being a knight fighting off a fearsome dragon in the days of kings and queens. It could be a single mother of three, wanting to be a successful business owner and providing for her family. It could even be something as simple as walking down the street and seeing someone more attractive than yourself, and thinking, “How nice would it be to look like that?”

No matter where we are in time and space, every person wishes, however briefly, that they could walk in someone else’s shoes. So it’s not surprising that Dennis Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the main character in the 1990 classic Total Recall, wants that too.

A regular joe, Quaid has a surprisingly slammin’-hot wife played by the ever-foxy Sharon Stone, a job in construction, and constant dreams about him and a brunette woman standing on the barren surface of Mars. His wife pleads with him to forget about Mars, but Quaid can’t shake the desire to walk on the surface of the red planet.

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by Grace Crawford

All Divergent images courtesy of Red Wagon Entertainment, Summit Entertainment, and Lionsgate.

If you are extremely observant of things like the days of the weeks and the general passage of time, you noticed that we didn’t post a movie review last weekend. I’m gonna say right now that that’s my fault. It began with homework and a looming deadline, but as the week wore on and time continued to go by, I realized that I hadn’t posted a review yet for a very simple reason: I didn’t know what to write about or what I could possibly say.

Obviously this review is about Divergent, a movie based on a book that some people liked, a book that fell into the post-apocalyptic category, because that’s all the rage these days, apparently. But it’s going to be about some other things, too, because in the end, I have to borrow a page from Thom’s book and state the only fact I know for certain about this movie: it was a movie.

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by Grace Crawford

All images courtesy of Village Roadshow Pictures, Bazmark Productions, A&E Television, Red Wagon Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Pictures.

In my first year of university, my iPod disappeared. I’m not sure if it was stolen on the bus, if I lost it (losing stuff is kind of my thing), or if it slipped through a crack in space and time to be found by a 17th-century Puritan who declared it witchcraft and started an uproar over it. But even now, years later, I still find myself looking for it. Every so often, I’ll check my backpack and my purses and sweater pockets to see if I left it inside, even though I didn’t find it last time or the time before.

I could buy a new one, but I never have. I bought that iPod back in high school with my first paycheck from my first job. I liked the way it felt, the way it looked, the way all the settings and buttons were just so. It was perfect. It was mine. I don’t want a new one; I want that one. If I had to tear apart every bag or backpack or sweater I ever owned to find it, I probably would.

And this is about the time you’re wondering, “What on earth does this have to do with The Great Gatsby?”

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